Collective experience
1 — 7 May 2024
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”
By choosing this quote from Agnès Varda as an opening statement, Alexandra Swenden reveals a bit of her endeavor: intimate and public summoned together, listening to each other. It’s a story of a swampy city, a diverse neighborhood, of borders, of porosity. The story begins with a house – the historical residence of the painter Eugène Broerman, built in 1904 – patiently renovated to become today a place of life and creation.There’s this facade, unusually wide for Brussels, climbing with roses. There’s this square, elegant, very urban yet almost bucolic, and this unique counterpart: a prison resembling a fortress.
There’s the threshold we cross to discover an initial dialogue, between the organic structure of a harmonium and the sculptural density of a strange reliquary. This exchange, wordless, bypassing reason, speaks directly to the body.
And here we are.
In this house, described as “a living playground in multiple dimensions,” the subject is it, us, even the house itself. Physical body, sensitive body, social body, shell body, standard body, acting body, receptacle body, refuge body, vector body. At Les Passagées unfolds a story of connections, of circulations. A story of language, of breath, of digestion. Of bodies, again.
And here we are.
At the crossroads of the senses, where arts intertwine, collide, percolate. Where artworks brush against inhabited, visited, traversed spaces. Where played, traced, danced, spoken materials quench us and caress us, move us and pierce us. They touch us even more as they ricochet: when Benoît Nieto Duran’s choreography oscillates, crawls, and leaps on the concrete floor of the atelier; when unheard tones emerge from Barbara Drazkov’s prepared piano; when the interplay of elements, colors, and scales arranged by the visual artist Valérie Novello grips us beyond sight; when Raphaël Vens’ bell piece takes us outside to question the point of fusion of artifice and reality; when actress Marie-Rose Meysman gives voice and life to the infinite subtlety of the ordinary.
If art in its countless forms proves nourishing, associating it here, literally, with earthly nourishments, completes the circle of sensory experience. The stroll is also a tasting, the kitchen also a performance, entrusted to the free interpretation of chef Chiho Kanzaki. “We are the landscape” once affirmed a Brussels theater. We are what we absorb, filtering the infected, celebrating the sublime. We are forgetting and consciousness, of ourselves in the landscape, of the landscape within us.
-M.B. (translated from french)
About:
Art and food are two worlds that shape and imprint landscapes within us.
But what do these landscapes look like?
And how do we reach them?
During the multidisciplinary performance Inner Lands & Scapes, we invite you to explore, consciously and at your own rhythm, your own inner landscape, stimulated and emphasised by the works and creations of a series of artists.
Imagine this tailor-made experience as a sensory stroll through the unseen spaces of our historic house. Expect to be swept away by the sounds and vibrations of Barbara Drazkov’s prepared pianos, transcended by the monumental works of Valérie Novello, the words of Marie-Rose Meysman and immersed in the shadows and gestures of choreographer and dancer Benoît Nieto Duran. All of this will be accompanied at different moments during the evening by culinary creations invented by the supremely sensitive Japanese chef, Chiho Kanzaki.
As you pass through the different strata of the house, the works will offer themselves to you along the way. They will overlap, respond, and link up. And by making connections between different artistic mediums, we’ll be seeking to create openings, portals, and sensory passageways to unexpected landscapes.
What to expect:
· five culinary experiences throughout the performance all created by Michelin star chef Chiho Kanzaki.
· a tailor-made dance performance by dancer and choreographer Benoît Nieto Duran.
· a sonic experience by pianist and composer Barbara Drazkov on three different prepared pianos & harmoniums throughout the house.
· a serie of monumental art works by artist Valérie Novello.
· different sound pieces by sound creator Raphaël Vens.
· the mesmerising voice and words of Marie-Rose Meysman.
· and a shared meal (and drinks) with the artists after the performance by Chiho Kanzaki.
listen to an extract by Raphaël Vens :